WJJY tower (site)

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In 1969 Look Television built a 1610 foot tower on this site for WJJY TV. It was one of three of the tallest structures in North America at the time. The UHF channel 14 transmitter transmitted four and a half million watts and was the highest effective radiated power of any UHF station in the world at the time. It was topped with an experimental RCA "Vee-Zee" antenna, one of only three ever constructed. Since the station aired on the lowest portion of the UHF dial, the antenna weighed 26 tons--one of the heaviest ever put into service. On its first day on the air, reception reports came in from as far south as Cape Girardeau, Missouri and as far north as Minneapolis. The station had financial trouble and WJJY was only on the air for a couple of years. Look Television eventually agreed in principle to sell the tower to Convocom, a consortium of west-central Illinois educational institutions. Convocom planned to used the tower for WJPT, a PBS member station serving Springfield and Quincy. However, on March 26, 1978--while financing was still being put together--a severe ice storm coated the tower with thick sheets of ice. With the shifting weight of the antenna, the tower collapsed. It had been designed with the specifications of a lighter antenna, and was thus not properly engineered to sustain so much weight. The same ice storm brought down WAND's tower, which was designed similarly to WJJY's tower.